Another bus bites the dust: EISA is no more on DragonFly. I don’t know if there’s even any system that DragonFly could boot on and would use this. Still, remove your hats and enjoy a moment of silence.

The latest(?) version of BSD Magazine is out. Among other things, it has an intro to pkgsrc. The site lists November 2010 for this issue, but it just showed up on the Twitter feed, so I’m not totally sure I have this right. In any case, it’s a free download.

Tim Bisson posted a note on the progress he and Pratyush have made on a virtio driver for DragonFly, ported from NetBSD. This is for use in virtualized environments; his post links to graphs (yay!) that show the performance improvement over emulated IDE. His note also links to the code and documentation.

Sepherosa Ziehau fixed a clock issue with the JMicron JMC250/JMC260 chipset, used with the jme(4) driver, and apparently JMicron helped out with hardware for testing this fix. So, thanks, Sephe, and thanks, JMicron! (buy their stuff)

Jan Lentfer’s got the 4.4 version of pf ready for testing. Filtering, queuing, redirection, NAT – all working. It has to be built into your kernel, though that’s all of 3 lines of work. Download his branch and try it.

Another Google Code-In project arrives: libfsid. It’s used to get the volume label for a given file system. (see man page) It makes me happy to see more Google Code-In projects coming to fruition and getting committed – suggest more, if you have them!

There’s a lengthy dialog on the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list about pkgsrc, and “Making it easier to get and use pkgsrc“. You can follow the whole thread on the listing page. I am all for the idea. Everybody and their brother has an App Store these days. Ports/pkgsrc are perhaps the original app store ideas, and I’d like to see them brought to the same level as these commercial entitites. This is important: pkgsrc is perhaps the only app store equivalent in existence that is not tied to a platform; that exists only to get you software rather than to provide a way to tie a platform into its developers profits.

Along the same lines, Promote Perl by Building Great Things. This applies to BSD products too; telling people it’s great doesn’t work as well as making something great and showing that a BSD system is part of what makes it so.

fetch’ would work just as well on a BSD system. The interesting thing is that it’s a one-liner for installing software that doesn’t make any assumptions about having an existing framework like pkgsrc or aptitude or anything like that – it just grabs the code and plops it in place. It wouldn’t work for more complex software, but the simplicity is intriguing, to match the Unix-like single, chainable program idea.

For those who haven’t seen it, ‘ack‘ is a grep replacement that automatically takes care of common activities around searching – skipping files that would cause duplicate matches, binary files, etc., handles a larger range of regular expressions, and runs startlingly fast.

Numbers everyone should know. (via) I link to this cause it’s interesting, and because it shows something else. If you understand what these numbers mean, congratulations. You speak a language that a limited number of people on this planet can understand. Think about that for a bit.

A simple explanation for ‘git reset –hard’. Some chunks of git are magical, in that I know they work but the internal behavior is still opaque to me. It may be best to keep it that way.

I do gain a perverse sense of pride that DragonFly is an all-volunteer organization. Linux, on the other hand, is mostly a corporate product. (via) I realize this is not a legitimate thing, and I’d love having enough of a market that someone could be paid to work on DragonFly.

Hey, the Economist Magazine’s Babbage blog is pretty good. I like this recent article about the Eye-Fi, a device I tell people about whenever I can. It essentially erases the need for storage on your camera. The last paragraph in the Babbage entry is also a little bit important.

The Google Code-In projects for DragonFly are bearing fruit, as there’s new pages in the new handbook, plus codecommits from various finished projects. 14 tasks are done, and there’s 10 more in progress, out of… I think 50? This is a good rate, considering there’s more than a month left.

The December theme for the Open Source Business Resource is “Humanitarian Open Source”. It sounds somewhat ethereal, but the articles actually concentrate on achieving concrete targets. Plus, more microfinance!